jb747 - just to challenge you slightly on this - why do you claim that they will never develop the skills to deal with things when they go wrong? That's a pretty big call. I agree they wont have the experience at the time they take on teh FO role but over time surely they will gain the required experience. A 500 hour pilot has to have 200 hours at some point...
Because the environment that they operate in isn't one in which they will ever get to practice the things that come naturally to people outside of airliners. They will learn how to be good systems operators, but they will never learn how to be pilots. Manual flying is effectively banned in many environments (and pretty well everywhere in the cruise). The aircraft themselves do not allow excess bank, stalling, etc...so that if you ever see it...it will be for real, the system will be degraded in some way, and you simply will never have done it enough for the recovery actions to become a reflex (which is why so many pilots have real trouble understanding how the AF447 pilots never put in stall recovery inputs). As an example, I have about 1,000 hours on the A380...but only about 5 hours of that entails actual manual flying (and a large part of that came as a result of a series of failures on one flight). My personal starting point on this aircraft is the better part of 20,000 hours, of which about 2,000 would be actually flying...and my skills will degrade due to lack of practice, but at least they existed in the first place.
It's worth noting that my employer recognised this as an issue around ten years ago, and as a result, banned what was called 'vertical promotion'. It had been possible to join, become a 744 SO, wait for a while and become a 744 FO, and wait for a long while (which never actually happened) and become a 744 Captain. At no point in that sequence would you ever operate an aircraft in an environment with lots of take offs and landings...in which lots and lots of non cruise skills are required. The opportunity does not exist in the longer haul aircraft. So, if you wanted to be promoted, you had to move to the 737 or 767.
So..what about the simulator? Well, firstly you must remember, that although they are very clever devices they do not actually simulate anything, but rather they do what they are told will happen. If you fail a system, the sim response may well be quite different to that to of the aircraft. They are flight simulators, not system simulators (system sims exist at the manufacturers, but I'm told they don't necessarily look anything like a coughpit). They are great for practicing the procedures, and for common emergencies, but, they are not cost effective ways of teaching people to push forward in a stall, or that hitting the ground hurts, or that the sky should be above you. They cost a couple of thousand dollars an hour to run, and are busy 24 hours a day. The incident that I alluded to earlier involved an air data computer failure, followed a few hours later by a probe heat failure on a side slip sensor. The aircraft saw that as a dual ADC failure, dropped to alternate law II, and lost the autopilots and flight directors. At the time, the sim, if given an identical failure sequence, responded quite differently, going to alternate I, with the automatics still available. The sim was subsequently updated by the maker to include what had now become know as the actual aircraft behaviour.
Perhaps worth noting too, that of the three major QF incidents over the past few years (QF30, 72, and 32), two involved the loss of the automatics...so the need for real flying skills isn't dead yet.
